Put Your Hands Into The Fire
by Cruelest Sea
Summary: New Dawn was only temporarily stopped. Later everything fell apart. But life has a strange way of repeating, of tying loose threads in ways we never can suspect, no matter how we may view it at the time. AU, post-series.


**_ Put Your Hands Into The Fire_**

_ "Time is the longest distance between two places. "-Tennessee Williams_

_ Come on, come on  
Put your hands into the fire  
Explain, explain  
As I turn and meet the power  
This time, This time  
Turning white and senses dire._

They say at the moment before death your life flashes before your eyes. Its a lie, you know. There are no memories in vivid color, no regrets unspoken, and no sorrows expressed between the moment you realize your life can be measured in seconds and the moment you draw your final breath. What remains is only a clarity, a vision of both hindsight and foresight. Things can be different next time because so much is yet to come, and so much can be changed. Time is never fixed, never sedentary, only waiting for the future, for another future, and for someone to change everything.

You wonder, even now, if you could have changed anything back then, tried harder to convince Connor to listen to you, stopped him before it was too late. You don't blame him, or Matt, only yourself, because you'd known him longer and better than anyone, in many ways better than yourself, and you should have been able to do more before it was too late. The skies are yellow now and you've forgotten the color blue, along with everything else, everything except the knowledge that it's only the beginning, that the air that does nothing more than make you cough a little now will one day kill everything that's survived this long, and that you, who lived a year in a world before humans were dreamed of, might live long enough to see a world where they've simply ceased to exist, the world's beginning and ending all in one lifetime.

But that was a millennium ago and you've been twice that long without him.

oooOOOooo

Life, above everything else, is cruel. There's nothing but hope and happiness those first few days as Connor and you discuss wedding plans while herding creatures through anomalies, and Matt, always so guarded and on edge with his burdens, finally lets go of their weight and starts looking to the future, a very different future than the one he'd been raised to prevent. Everything is so _good_ that maybe you ignore the warning signs, dismiss them as rumors until it's far too late.

New Dawn was neither the beginning or the end, merely a step in man's evolution, a fate he'd created for himself. Like a domino knocked into the next and the one after it, it started, if not quite the end, than at least the beginning of the finale, a slow building to the close. There were fewer anomalies, fewer creatures, and you were all so optimistic, so confident that you'd prevented the worst that nothing else seemed to matter. The news reports should have caught your eyes, of rising temperatures dismissed as creeping global warming, of strange weather and violent winds, of poison tides, and starfish vanishing into the seas. And at night when Connor started coughing so violently your own chest hurt you told yourself it was just a cold, a virus picked up on a rainy day, and nothing to worry about. By then you knew what you'd only suspected the day the world almost ended, and as much as it scares you it seems a hope, a promise that everything will be all right.

In retrospect, Matt guessed it first. He'd spent most of his life in that time, living beneath the ground, senses honed to survival. His face, once so expressionless, unmarked by emotions such as fear, was more relaxed then, more open with the walls that had carefully held him to his purpose having crumbled. It was in his eyes that you saw _it_, that you realized what you should have all along. You can't remember the exact day, the anomaly, or even where you were, but you still see the look in his eyes when Connor doubled over coughing, put a hand to his mouth, and drew back red.

After that, everything fell apart. Connor grew quiet, and weaker, blaming himself for what happened to the world, and you kept your secret tucked inside you, another day, another week because it was too early for anyone to tell, and you hadn't the heart to say it. The oceans died first, a little more each day, as the scientists pondered a sky rapidly turning to yellow and a world where all life, species by species, was slowly dying out. You all moved into the arc, living together out of necessity to spend more hours close to the fading equipment. The winds started, stronger and more violent, and people choked on the dust and coughed blood until they died.

The air was toxic, Matt had said, poison, and Connor had breathed so much of it, sucked it deep into his lungs where no water could wash out, and no medicine could cure, even if they hadn't been in a world going mad.

You took care of Connor until the end like a wife would, someone bound by vows or honor, but you were never married, and you never will be, because you can't be a widow and a bride at the same time. You lie to him, right up until the last, anything and everything you think to say, from telling him that he's getting better when he's too weak to lift his hand to yours, to threatening to leave him if he doesn't fight harder, to saying that he'll outlive you all. He doesn't believe any of it - you always were a terrible liar - but it keeps you alive, pastes the jagged shards of each day together enough to keep them from ripping through you, leaving only a trickle of blood instead of a hemorrhage where you think you used to have a heart.

You were telling the truth in the end, at least partly. A creature took Emily's life right at the beginning, one of the few missed, and even under different circumstances no one could have saved her, but you all tried with everything you had. Lester and Jess went out to find a doctor while Becker was off hunting for supplies and neither came back, and you've seen too much to have any doubt as to what happened. There were no predators, not what you'd called that at least, but there were the human kind, desperate and hungry and frightened. Scared enough to eventually approach, to beg for help like a child, but angry enough to put a bullet through Matt's chest when they didn't get what they wanted. You didn't scream then, even when you wiped the blood off his face as if it mattered, pumping a heart that had already bled out as Becker fired eight more times into the head of the man who'd killed him, the first shot an impossible fraction of a second too late. By then Connor was too far gone to truly be aware of any of it, and you don't tell him.

He lingers longer than Matt had whispered, long enough to see for himself that no matter what else you told him you were never lying about the thing that mattered the most, the secret you finally told him. You're next to him when he dies, so close you can feel every breath through your own body, one of his hands locked in yours, the other held against the fluttery kicks that seem far too rapid in contrast to an ebbing heart, your body curled against him as if you can force your life into him. By then, only Becker is left, and he stays in another room, far away for hours. When it's over he comes in and kneels down, pulling you into his chest, and you hit him, fists against his beating heart, screaming, but he holds onto you until the screaming turns into gasping sobs and finally silence.

You don't say Connor's name again, or even mention him indirectly. It's how you survive, a sort of cold numbness that swallows everything else whole. You think of Rex, sometimes, because part of you tells yourself that he might still be out there, still alive, because you didn't watch him die like the others, but never Connor except when the baby's movements force you to remember nights held close in the darkness of the distant past with the stars shimmering like an anomaly above you, and his voice telling you that when you - both of you - get home everything will be better.

Now there's only you and Becker left, survivors who've somehow forgotten how to die. You live with ghosts, a half dozen of them, and walk with the dead clinging to your ankles like the dust from the winds that made him one of them. It isn't living, but then again, it isn't dying, either. You don't know if Connor made him promise or if it's just him, but Becker treats you like glass after that. You have your own guns but he won't let you leave the building, and as the months pass he spends most nights propped up against the opposite wall, head down on his knees and his gun against his feet. He stores up all the food that's left when your due date is close, spending days less than a room away for the instant you call.

Between the two of you the baby enters the world, and Becker doesn't complain about your cursing at him and digging your fingernails into his arms, only holds the infant for a full minute before he hands it to you, a naked, wriggling little thing that looks absurdly small in his hands but with enough of a voice for both of you. Connor, you know, would have been sobbing, would have been bouncing with joy and half frantic with worry, and he would have filled the room all by himself, making you laugh and forget the pain. This is unearthly quiet, soundless except for the baby's cries and the ragged sound of your breath, and every ounce of your body is threaded with a raw aching. You take him in your arms when Becker gives him over, but your only thought is a faint sense of gratitude when you see his cheeks, smooth and without the faintest hint of dimples. Connor would have wanted him named Nicholas after Cutter, and you almost consider it, before you realize you can't remember what Cutter looked like anymore, and Sarah's face is blurred in your mind, and you've nearly forgotten Stephen entirely. There's been too much death, and there's no need to pass it onto the baby, to name him after a father he'll never know or a friend long dead. In the end you don't call him anything, because names don't seem to matter anymore, and to give or learn a name is to feel part of someone, to care too much, because only a stranger is nameless and unknown.

That night Becker sleeps next to you and you don't send him to his side of the room, not even when his head lolls sideways, coming to rest against your shoulder, his arm brushing his jacket that bundles the baby. When his face twitches in sleep, painful lines etching into the sides of his mouth, you turn your face and rest your cheek against his forehead, like a child in need of comfort, like the nights in the past you spent with Connor when the nightmares came. You share demons, and here, after everything else is gone, nothing else seems to matter.

oooOOOooo

For a while, it's enough. The supplies, along with whatever Becker finds to hunt, last, and the baby thrives, seemingly ignorant of a lifeless earth seen only though locked glass doors. He grows, crawling before you even realize it, shrieking with laughter as Becker carries him around the room like an airplane. Despite yourself, you find yourself looking for the pieces of Connor in him, the remnants of what used to be, if not to reclaim it in some way, to at least remind yourself that it once existed at all.

You live forever like this, or so it seems, and you think you might survive, might make it, until Becker comes in one day, a gash in his side, staggering and bleeding from where a creature's claws slashed deep into him. You treat it at best you can, swallowing the panic in your throat, the taste of acid as you see the shredded flesh and dirt caked into the wound, and you even manage to keep the panic from your face when he wakes you in the night, tossing and turning in the beginnings of fever. He's ill, but he's not going to die, not like everyone else, because you won't allow it. You take his shoulders, shaking him hard until his eyes flutter open, fever-glazed and dim. His blood is still caked beneath your fingernails, flaking bits of red onto his shirt, and you shout at him, demanding he listen to you, demanding he live, and hating yourself when your voice breaks.

His face registers only the barest surprise when you lean forward and kiss him hard, hesitates only a moment before kissing you back. His lips are chapped and split and he tastes of dust and ashes, but he's breathing, and you've tasted too much of death already. He isn't Connor and you aren't Jess and neither of you ever could be enough, ever could replace all you've lost, not with the poisoned air trapped in your heart, but you're all that's left, all that keeps each other alive, and all that matters.

It's hard, it seems, to have so much of your existence bound up in another.

oooOOOooo

Your moment of clarity comes before you die, or one of them at least, in the form of a man heading east, to higher ground, to a hope of food and water, it doesn't seem to matter which, only that he's the first kind face you've seen in all this time, the first chance you've seen, and you know, somehow intuitively, what you should do. Becker doesn't question you when he comes back to find you alone, staring at the computers, long broken and useless, only bends down and kisses the side of your forehead against your hair, lips still warm with the fever he can't seem to shake. You didn't give your son up because you didn't want him, even if you know you should have been a better mother, given him more love, a name at least. But you've given him all you can, the one thing you can't give yourself, not anymore, because you've been dead a long time now. You've given him a chance at life.

And so, that night as you lay next to Becker, his head against your shoulder, eyes closed in sleep, and one hand tucked against the wound that stubbornly refuses to heal, you know the child is safe, with a stranger, but alive and well, protected, the last thing you could give Connor. There will be no more children, ever, because even if you survived in this world for a hundred years you would never have another, and you know you won't live that long anyway. But you've broken your chains to the past, and let it all go, locked it inside you in a place you can never feel again. So this time when Becker wakes up, and you kiss him, you don't think of Connor. It's Becker's lips, and Becker's arms around you, and for only a moment, brief and fleeting, you want to live, to go on. But you put the thought behind you.

You have a month together, or just shy of one, before the predators find you. There are hundreds of them now, twisted, deformed creatures damaged beyond recognition and more deadly than the ones you remember. They hover for days as your supplies start to run out, and then, as if sensing your weakness, they start to break in. You stand in the middle in the room, a gun in your hand, Becker so close his arm is brushing yours, and you lift your chin, face expressionless.

Your hand extends, fingers reaching until you find Becker's hand, and you take it. His fingers are cool, nearly cold, and you think yours are, too, lifeless it seems while you're both still breathing. His grip tightens around your hand, and you think, as strange and terrible as it's been, you''ve somehow been..not happy, but _alive_ with him, an undead heart somehow finding a few final beats at the last. Neither of you were enough for each other, and neither of you ever could be, but you were all you had and somehow it was necessary for survival to have each other, like a need for air to live. There was no disloyalty in it, because it wasn't love, not love in the way you used to measure it, and yet you can think of no other word to describe it.

It comes to this: a movement at the door as glass shatters, the noise of the predators drawing close, and the sound of Becker's gun opening fire at the instant yours does, and for only a moment a thought, a memory growing dim as your hand stays locked in Becker's even as your fingers go slack.

_"What's his name?" You don't look up, only shake your head as your fingers loosen, falling away from the tiny fingers as you let go of your son, of Connor's child._

_"What about...Matthew?" The stranger, Gideon Anderson, suggests, lifting the boy into his arms. "Matt for short."_

_And you smile then, a painful grimace that twists your face into a grimace like a wounded creature, because you finally understand, know what you should have guessed, should have suspected from the first time you saw him. Do better this time, you think, a fleeting thought, half plea and half desperate wish. This time, don't let it happen. But you don't give it voice._

_"Yeah." Your voice is steady. "I like that."_


End file.
